What are you currently reading?

[Todd]

From The Lancet: Effects of international sanctions on age-specific mortality: a cross-national panel data analysis

The takeaway, for the period 1971-2021:

Findings Our findings showed a significant causal association between sanctions and increased mortality. We found the strongest effects for unilateral, economic, and US sanctions, whereas we found no statistical evidence of an effect for UN sanctions. Mortality effects ranged from 8·4 log points (95% CI 3·9–13·0) for children younger than 5 years to 2·4 log points (0·9–4·0) for individuals aged 60–80 years. We estimated that unilateral sanctions were associated with an annual toll of 564,258 deaths (95% CI 367 838–760 677), similar to the global mortality burden associated with armed conflict

[Florestan]

Paul Feval - The White Wolf

Not a great writer, to be sure, but a damn good story-teller.

Actually, I take that back. Within his domain he is great. After all, if you disregard all digressions and asides from, say, Balzac's or Hugo's novels, you are more often than not left with plots, characters and actions not unlike Feval's. Not to mention that his style is almost classical compared to the latter's, what with their turgid and mawkish prose.

[SimonNZ]

Finished:



Starting:

[Florestan]

Alexandre Dumas - Antony

Yet another piece of Romantic trash: if you passionately love a woman married with child, the best way to show your love is to stab her to death, because love is about you and you only: if you can't have the woman you love, nobody else should have her.

Truly and irrefutably, Romanticism is a (psychic) disease.

[ritter]

Alexandre Dumas - Antony

Yet another piece of Romantic trash: if you passionately love a woman married with child, the best way to show your love is to stab her to death, because love is about you and you only: if you can't have the woman you love, nobody else should have her.

Truly and irrefutably, Romanticism is a (psychic) disease.

A disease you seem strangely attracted to, Andrei!    Why keep reading this kind of "trash"?

A good evening to you.

[Florestan]

A disease you seem strangely attracted to, Andrei!    Why keep reading this kind of "trash"?

Because both Antony and Chatterton were repeatedly and insistently cited in the Louis Maigron book I referred to above as having heavily influenced a whole lot of French youngsters around 1830.

My interest in this kind of Romanticism is strictly clinical. 

Muy buenas noches, Rafael!

[ritter]

...
My interest in this kind of Romanticism is strictly clinical. 
...

Yeah, right!    I see.

[Florestan]

Switching between these two:

 

[Mandryka]

[Todd]

Defining Strategic Stability: Reconciling Stability and Deterrence, by Elbridge Colby.

[pjme]

I'm only half way, but find this novel already outrageously good. It is very cruel, witty, very sharp, full of fantastic byways and helps me think of the meaning of life....